I always wondered why there was so little river activity around KC and on the missouri river in general. must be some navigational reason for that, or maybe just inertia with most of the ports being on the mississippi in the state.

This is really positive news - I assume KC will keep its other port. With the difficulties trucking is experiencing - demand for commodity barge traffic should really accelerate over the next couple of years.

I'm guessing that the renewed need for river barge traffic has something to do with the fact that 40 percent of American grain (mostly grown in the Midwest) is sent overseas now. A large amount of that is probably shipped out from New Orleans or Houston. Shipping grain from the Midwest using the Missouri, Ohio, and Mississippi makes the most sense when so much volume of grain is being sent over the oceans. The Chinese are also buying a lot of sand and cement for building construction. I think I read recently that China now uses more cement than the rest of the world combined.

The new inland port “Missouri River Terminal” is supposed to be an intermodal container port. Not commodities like the current one. UrbanSTL has a lot of information about a group called Americans Patriot Holdings that is about to build a line of river container ships. These new ships will service Missouri, Ohio, and Mississippi River cities out of a base just south of New Orleans.

a limiting factor for the missouri river is the last lock in the chain of rocks canal on the mississippi just north of st. louis, along with depth and all of the wing dikes. if they can scale these container ships down to work with that and still be profitable then great. all of the renderings of these things i have seen are for the non-lock and dam section of the mississippi river for st.louis and south and are rather large.

Because the vessels are too large to get through the Mississippi River lock and dam system that starts north of St. Louis, officials said, the St. Louis area is a logical place to locate a loading and unloading hub, fed by rail, barge and truck.

Litrico said that of the local ports, his firm preferred Jefferson County because it’s south of the metro area’s bridges, which could cause clearance problems during high-water periods.

Litrico’s company also plans to build somewhat smaller container vessels that could get through the locks and also use tributaries such as the Missouri and Illinois rivers